Tag: Imogen Heap

Today, November 7th, marks a turning point in Ujo’s history. Due to ongoing maintenance costs, the time has come for us to bid farewell to our beloved Alpha project. Instead of spending time maintaining the prototype, which fulfilled its purpose, we are knuckling down to build an open platform for all artists.

The Ujo team joined with Grammy award winning artist, Imogen Heap’s initial Mycelia experiment as both wanted a more fair and open music industry. Imogen posted Tiny Human to her website along with all relevant metadata for the song to see what new music services could do with it. In collaboration with Heap, we were able to showcase the power of the blockchain in getting Tiny Human up for sale on the newly launched Ethereum blockchain.

Grammy Award-winning U.K. singer, songwriter, and producer, Imogen Heap, has pushed a little further her call for the use of the blockchain technology as the solution to many of the issues dogging the present day music industry.

As reported by Real Business, Heap explained why it is time for the industry to reinvent the way people discover new content and the creators get paid after giving the crowd at the Oslo Innovation Week a short performance with her Mi.Mu gestural music gloves.

Ujo Music was the startup that worked with musician Imogen Heap in 2015 to release her track “Tiny Human” on the Ehtereum blockchain. Now the company is preparing for a full commercial launch of its platform for other artists and labels to use. “Soon, Ujo Music will be open to the public. We’re targeting early 2017,” explained the company in an email sent out to its mailing list yesterday.

“We are building a service that allows you to manage your artistic identity, your music and licensing on your own terms. We are starting small, with music, onboarding eager, forward-looking artists to empower sustainable creativity,” explained the company.

One of blockchain’s most vocal bell-ringers is the Grammy Award-winning UK singer, songwriter and producer Imogen Heap. “Blockchain is completely enabling us to rethink the basic, core structure of how monetary distribution works in the industry,” Heap told City A.M. “It can be used to build a united platform and create an ecosystem, but most importantly builds innovation under the standards that make sense for artists.”

The research would seem to back up Heap’s point. In a report this week released by the Blockchain for Creative Industries cluster at Middlesex University and the Featured Artists’ Coalition (FAC), researchers found four areas where using blockchain could be a genuine asset to the music industry.

The singer’s experiment with “Tiny Human” is the precursor to an entire music eco-system she’s building called “Mycelia,” named after a thread of underground fungus that grows for miles.

Aside from enabling faster, direct payments for artists, Heap wants to create a free platform where musicians have control over the data created by their songs as they circulate among fans and other musicians, including the song’s credits, terms of usage dictated by the artist, where the song is played and when, and any transactions.

This information is tracked using blockchain technology, a method of recording digital transactions first used for Bitcoin.